Start spreading the news: you'll soon be able to see some of the biggest names in opera for €17 in New York's Metropolitan, writes Mary Finn
Bad news about that Aer Lingus surcharge: now there's an additional €70 per person to add on to the cost for New York weekends. The good news, however, is that from September the Manhattan-bound may indulge in one of the world's prime cultural experiences for as little as €17 and a mouse click.
A seat in the gods - though they don't use that Old World term - at the Metropolitan Opera has traditionally been available for $26 (€20) throughout the season. That was excellent value, but under the Met's new regime, from next autumn, that cheapest ticket will be reduced to a school-hall price of $15. After paying the $5 online charge, a European visitor's total bill is €17.
Plácido Domingo will doubtless be extra, admittedly, but that €17 may buy, for instance, the presence of Romanian superstar Angela Gheorghiu, the Argentinian José Cura, or the US's own darlings, Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson. Or, in summer, the full repertory of American Ballet Theatre, Mikhail Baryshnikov's former company. At such curtain-ups, when the Met's starburst chandeliers retract into the ceiling and six layers of opera-goers hush on cue, it's advisable to pinch oneself.
You may not be an archangel, only an overhanging seraph, but a mere €17 for this? Small wonder that, according to the Met's press office, this season more than 500 Irish opera-goers have made online bookings.
Opera houses - like divas perhaps - tend to throw hissy fits when asked which is the fairest of all. Paris, London, Vienna, Milan, Munich and Moscow laud their cultural remits, state budgets and artistic lineage. Sydney is a siren in a blue sea, Venice a phoenix, Naples a natural.
But the Met has money, trillionaires' money. Last January it got a $25 million (almost €20 million) donation from one Texas venture capitalist. The deep pockets of American private cultural endowment reach all the way back to Messrs Morgan, Roosevelt, Astor and Vanderbilt, who underwrote the original Metropolitan Opera House in 1883. Press releases make proud mention that government and city grants to the Met add up to no more than a quarter of one per cent of its income. Nonetheless, the Met's hugely popular live radio broadcasts to 42 countries, carried here on RTÉ Lyric FM each Saturday night, lost their longtime Chevron sponsor in 2004. These are currently underwritten by a building firm, but the opera house maintains a canny Save the Met Broadcasts campaign.
At the Lincoln Center (built in 1966 on West Side Story-type tenement clearances), the Met is the sun, encircled by 11 other cultural satellites. It's a 52-week house with its own full orchestra, chorus and ballet complement, under its long-time music director James Levine. Anything but classical, the Met's design is refreshingly childlike: a glass-box front through which Marc Chagall's glowing tapestries beam out, staircases of both the showy and the disappearing kinds, an auditorium ceiling made of runny, golden eggs. Its stage production facilities are unrivalled and include a turntable that rarely goes unused, stage elevators and giant cycloramas. (Crime writer Linda Fairstein set her latest book, Death Dance, complete with diva murder, backstage at the Met. Backstage tours are available.)
Out front the patron, even the $15 one, has an individual sub-title screen and gets a free programme, a Playbill one, as in all New York theatres. There are drinking fountains with cups, a restaurant (expensive) and fast-serving bars on three levels. You can hire binoculars and hard-of-hearing aids. If you are late you will be shown into a small auditorium with a live video feed until the release time, pre-ordained by the conductor.
THE INTERVALS ARE a decent half-hour, so tacky beverage gulping doesn't happen. That's when some of the best people-watching in the city is on offer. Here are the queenly, the Upper East Side seasonals, the dressers, the gushers, the nonchalant solos. There are singles nights at the Met (but that'll go considerably beyond the €17 budget).
The season from September next is feisty, diverse, even crossover. Peter Gelb, the new general manager at the Met, comes from Sony Classical, where he was considered to be a prime audience-maker. He is steering a policy of innovative productions and the commissioning of more new work. Madame Butterfly, directed by Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, is to open the 2006-2007 season. Domingo himself will take the title role in The First Emperor, a mythological creation by Tan Dun which will be staged by Chinese director Zhang Yimou, and the iconoclastic but always music-sensitive choreographer Mark Morris will stage a new production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice in May 2007.
Broadway directors are also coming on board, and the Met has committed itself to a run of "family friendly" productions during holiday periods, beginning with a creature-stocked, English-language version of The Magic Flute over Christmas. While the radio sponsorship deficit continues, Gelb has heralded the imminent arrival of audio-visual broadcasts to be screened in certain cinemas or downloadable on broadband.
A brave new world, then, but there's nothing quite like striding past the Lincoln Center fountain to the glassy palace where mouse-secured tickets-at-a-snip wait as faithfully for you as their $375 brethren wait for the glad-ragged arriving in limousines. Booking hasn't opened yet for the 2006-2007 season (check from August 20th onwards), but get in early. Even the gods are ranked in numerical order and first is best.
Information on productions, and online booking, at www.metopera.org